Our new Women Writers Committee Chair Judyth Hill (San Miguel PEN) opened the meeting with an eloquent introduction of the Empty Chair. Narges Mohammadi, the winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, has been sentenced to 30 or more years in prison in Iran, and has been in and out of prison since 1997, sometimes in solitary confinement. She has been outspoken about women’s rights and has refused to be silenced, even in prison. She has campaigned for women’s rights and against the death penalty and solitary confinement and has written books and articles on these subjects. Narges Mohammadi is an honorary member of several PEN Centres.
Outgoing chair, Zoë Rodriguez, has been our chair for six years. In 2018 at the Congress in Pune the panels were still all composed of men. Her aim was to hold organizations to account: if there was no gender balance, why wasn’t there? This is one reason the VIDA count is so important. Looking back over the last six years Zoë recalled important reports by Ma Thida in Myanmar and by women in Ukraine, Russia, Afghanistan, and Iran. During the COVID year (or more), when we couldn’t meet in person, the WWC led the way in instituting Zoom meetings and influenced International PEN to have an online Congress.
We were fortunate to have Joanne Leedom-Ackerman with us. She had copies of her new book, PEN Journeys, and gave us an entertaining account of the first spark of what became the Women Writers’ Committee. In 1986 she was attending The International PEN Congress in New York City and spoke out against the exclusively male panels. Norman Mailer made things worse by claiming that there were no qualified or willing women writers to take part. Our committee owes its existence ultimately to Joanne’s identification of what should have been obvious: that even in PEN, let alone the wider world, women writers were being discriminated against. PEN Journeys covers Joanne’s long and distinguished career in PEN for the last forty years. Besides having been president of the Los Angeles PEN Centre, she has been Chair of the PEN Writers-in-Prison Committee and has been PEN International Secretary; her experience in PEN at all levels in unequalled, and we welcome her new book.
During the COVID year (or more), when we couldn’t meet in person, the WWC led the way in instituting Zoom meetings and influenced International PEN to have an online Congress.
Updates from the centres present are always a high point of our meetings. Many centres reported a new prominence of women writers in their centres and generally in their country. Women were presidents and board members. The San Miguel de Allende centre was predominantly women! Women writers were more visible in Ukraine because the men were generally fighting in the war against Russian aggression.
Language was an issue in a few centres: Malaysia PEN has published ten books in four languages; indigenous languages in Argentina are getting attention.
As always, social problems become PEN problems. Malaysian PEN has to deal with dilemmas of race and xenophobia with an influx of refugees. In Argentina there is a repressive government and a spate of violence against women in literature; in Myanmar the military government has permitted no freedom to publish, and some women writers are imprisoned.
Money has dried up or wasn’t there to begin with. In Slovenia government grants have disappeared and only 20% of the writing prizes go to women. Things are even worse in Zimbabwe, where you need money to get published, but the Women’s Committee there is collecting poetry and fiction to be published.
Romanian PEN, bordering Ukraine, holds events with Ukrainian writers and Albanian PEN.
We also heard the sad tale of English PEN, where a Women’s Committee has never caught on and in fact consists of one person who has been active at the international level from the beginning. But from that beginning 35 years ago English PEN has corporately never felt a need to be part of the concern for women writers in other parts of the world, and so our Committee remains under its radar to this day. It is a strange anomaly in a centre otherwise busy with writers in prison and other PEN causes.
“Know Her Words” was the brainchild of our chair, Zoë, and one of the highlights of her tenure in office. The idea is further to the VIDA count and is to publicize the work of women writers in various countries so that we know what other women are writing, and to encourage translation between languages, and to learn of the problems of getting published. Judyth Hill suggested book clubs to read books from other centres and to have conversations about each other’s books.
The room was soon fizzing with ideas! Radio can be a good resource for women writers and children’s writers, as well as radio drama, Spotify, podcasts, Substack. The important thing is to put book lists and further ideas on the PIWWC website: www.PIWWC.org.
After lunch Lucina Kathmann of San Miguel formally introduced Judyth Hill, also of San Miguel and well known to us all for her energy and enthusiasm, as a candidate for the next chair of the WWC, running unopposed.
She has been a popular choice since she first announced her candidature. Her acceptance speech was full of enthusiasm for women writers working together and supporting other women writers worldwide. (Our election was then duly ratified by the Congress Assembly.)
Lucina Kathmann has been producing the trilingual newsletter Network, Le Réseau/la Red for the Committee every year since 1992! Now it is online rather than on paper. She gave us a brief history of the Committee, including the reason that we are enabled to attend the UN for the Committee on the Status of Women. Back in 1995 the then chair, Greta Rana of Nepal, took a group of Nepali women to the World Congress of Women in Beijing, and ever since then we have been allowed representation at the annual meeting at the UN every March. Lucina has headed that delegation, which now includes Elizabeth Starčević, and a report always appears in the Network. Violence against women is apparently getting worse, but statistics about death in childbirth are getting better. One new development is that girls are missing school because of menstrual problems and a lack of sanitary goods; even men are finally addressing this problem.
A second Empty Chair was the poet María Cristina Garrido Rodríguez of Cuba, who was arrested in 2021, beaten, and sentenced to seven years in jail. For the first year she was not allowed pen and paper. German PEN is working for her release.
A panel discussion concerned “Women Writers, Solutions and Hate Speech: Focus on Social Media” moderated by Tanja Tuma (Slovenian PEN).
On the panel were Margie Orford (South Africa), Wezi Msukwa-Panje (Malawi), Mahi Ramakrishnan of Malaysia. Margie told us that there was a long-standing prejudice against women speaking in a public sphere, and online is now the equivalent of that public sphere. It is hard to deal with old issues in a new form. The roots of femicide are in the erasure of women’s speech.
Is hate speech against men different from hate speech against women? The crucial difference is that hate speech against men consists of calling them insulting names, whereas hate speech against women is always sexual and violent with threats of rape and other intimidation. Women may censor their own speech to avoid threats. (Tanja Tuma recommended Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb.)
But how can we fight back? Literacy is essential. Boko Haram kidnaps girls from school precisely to prevent it. PEN can interact with states, but social media are in the province of private organisations; how can we deal with free speech issues with these private bodies? This is an important question for PEN to address. PEN needs new strategic thinking, new tools to deal with the problem of social media.
2024 © Sarah Lawson